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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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Carl Dennis was born on September 17, 1939, in St. Louis, Missouri, and attended both Oberlin College and the University of Chicago before completing his bachelor’s degree at the University of Minnesota. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dennis has published twelve books of poetry, including Another Reason (Penguin, 2014); Callings (Penguin, 2010); Practical Gods (Penguin, 2001), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Meetings with Time (Penguin, 1992), among others. Dennis has also published a book of criticism, Poetry as Persuasion (University of Georgia Press, 2001).

Known for its casual, plainspoken narrative style that makes its home in the everyday life of the American middle class, Dennis’s poetry is a quiet, almost intimate, meditation on the world around him. In a review of Dennis’s poems in The Washington Post, poet Robert Pinsky wrote, “The musing mind or voice reaches its object not with a turbulent roar of rhetoric, but with the penetration of fine oil. The poems of Carl Dennis proceed to startling, sometimes even upsetting conclusions by that musing process of mind, alert and patient.”

Dennis has received several honors and distinctions, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was the recipient of the 1989 Oscar Blumenthal Prize, the 1995 Bess Hokin Prize, the 1997 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize, and the 2000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Dennis taught at the University of Buffalo from 1966 to 2001, after which time he served as the school’s artist in residence. He also taught in the MFA program in creative writing at Warren Wilson College.

Change

Don't be chagrined that your novel,Which yesterday seemed done at last,Is revealed in the light of morningTo be only your latest draft.It could mean that your vision clearedWhile you were sleeping, your sense of fitnessGrows in the night like corn or bamboo.

Don't assume you're tampering with the truthBy wanting to make your hero more likable.He can still be someone who's liableTo fritter his life away in random pastimes.Only now, for his sake, you want to present himAs fighting a little harder against his temperamentSo the reader, instead of looking down from on high,Stands close enough to the action to sympathize.

As for your heroine, you can still depict herAs someone who hides, beneath her apparent warmth,A seam of coldness. But now you're ready to probeWhat the coldness conceals: the wound, say,That makes trust a challenge.Where, she wonders, will her courage come fromIf she's unable to find it when she looks within?

If you consider any hope of changeTo be, in the end, illusion, be true to your vision.Just don't ignore the change in yourself,Your willingness, say, to be more patientExploring alternatives. Each new effortCould prove another chapter in a single storySlowly unfolding in which you learnBy trial and error, what the plot requires.

In the meantime, let me assure you your heroineIn this new, more generous version,Seems to be learning somethingShe'll need to learn before the climaxIf real change is to be at least an option.Let me say that your hero's remorse near the endFor his lack of enterprise and directionIs more convincing than it's ever been.

At last, instead of giving a speech already written,He seems to be groping for words. Not sureWhat he'll say until he says it, and thenNot sure if he ought to be satisfiedOr open to one more try.

Carl Dennis

Carl Dennis was born on September 17, 1939, in St. Louis, Missouri, and attended both Oberlin College and the University of Chicago before completing his bachelor’s degree at the University of Minnesota. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

by this poet

Today as we walk in Paris I promise to focus
More on the sights before us than on the woman
We noticed yesterday in the photograph at the print shop,
The slender brunette who looked like you
As she posed with a violin case by a horse-drawn omnibus
Near the Luxembourg Gardens. Today I won't linger long
On the

I guess I have to begin by admitting
I'm thankful today I don't reside in a country
My country has chosen to liberate,
That Bridgeport's my home, not Baghdad.
Thankful my chances are good, when I leave
For the Super Duper, that I'll be returning.
And I'm thankful my TV set is still broken.
No point in wasting

If a life needn’t be useful to be meaningful,
Then maybe a life of sunbathing on a beach
Can be thought of as meaningful for at least a few,
The few, say, who view the sun as a god
And consider basking a form of worship.
As for those devoted to partnership with a surfboard

You meant more than life to me. I lived throughyou not knowing, not knowing I was living.I learned that you called for me. I came to whereyou were living, up a stair. There was no one there.No one to appreciate me. The legality of itupset a chair. Many times to

I closed the book and changed my life and changed my life and changed my life and one more change and I was back here looking up at a blue sky with russets and the World was hypnotic but it wasn't great. I wanted more range, maybe, more bliss, I didn't know about bliss. Is bliss just a rant